amazingly enough, louisville's own courier journal had a feature article today entitled "Let there be Blogs!". it never ceases to amaze me when the media covers something that actually has some bearing in my life.

this little tidbit seems appropriate, considering how recently the bipolarcam came into existence…

apparently, the world's first web cam is getting ready to be retired. after 10 years of service, the Trojan Room coffee pot cam will be shutting down. ah well, i suppose nothing can last forever. and of course, now that we have bipolarcam set up here, you can just watch us.

i started writing this big post yesterday about the (seeming) futility of life, but ended up having to scrap it because people here at work kept bringing me stuff to do. funny how i can go most of the day without anything, then from 3:30 – 5:30 stuff always finds its way to me. i'd much rather just HAVE something to do all day, than sit around half the day only to have to rush to fix or finish a couple little piddling jobs at the end.

it's not all that bad though, 'cause today, for the first time in several weeks, i've actually managed to make it through all the blogs in my "blogs" bookmark folder.

well, i hope everyone has been enjoying the new bipolar redesign. and i've gotten word from a couple people already who are interested in contributing to the choose your own bipolar collection. i'm really looking forward to getting that together… if only so i can eventually see which design turns out to be the favorite… i'll admit it, i've become a stats junky. the only problem is, i think this whole idea has postponed my original idea of just putting up screenshots of the winner and runner-up designs so you guys could look at 'em. maybe i'll get a screenshot of sharon's design up… or maybe i'll just devote the time to putting her into the rotation and figuring out the whole browser-cookies-with-php thing.

and my sister is apparently going to be spending the weekend in Florence, Italy, hopefully she'll come back with some fun stories for us.

oh, and brad, if you've still not managed to read the new green arrow, do so. It's pretty kick ass (as if we expected anything different from kevin smith after his astounding run on daredevil).

anyway, that's what i'm going to call a post for the day, unless something really exciting happens and i just have to write about it (don't hold your breath.) oh, and maybe i'll get back to that futility post in the future, if i feel there's really a point to it all.

welcome one and all to the official unveiling of bipolar 2.0. what you see before you is the glorious work of your friendly neighborhood (if your neighborhood happens to be hong kong) jessie hung (whose own site seems to be in a state of flux right now…), and also with some judicious scripting magic performed by yours truly.

a thousand thank-you's to jessie for this winning entry, and also to our other contestants (notably the greatest girl in the world), whose entries you'll also be seeing in the hopefully near future. as soon as jessie picks her favorite show from transmission3000, we'll be sending out her prize.

my task the past few days has been teaching myself rudimentary php scripting, and modularizing bipolar to the point where we'll soon be able to offer the option of selecting your favorite look. so, for those staunch goth/metal kids out there who loved the black & skulls theme of the old bipolar, you'll be able to choose that as your standard interface. notice, of course, that i'm saying "soon" and not really giving a specific date. in case you hadn't noticed by now, i'm a bit of a lazy bastard, and since i'm the one that has to do all this work, i'd rather not put myself under too much pressure.

also, due to this choose your favorite bipolar idea we're working on, if anyone still wants to get in on the bipolar redesign act, just whip something up and send it our way. we'd love to eventually have several hundred different designs available, if you guys think you're good enough.

anyway, enjoy the new design, and tell us what you think, or write jessie personally and tell her exactly how much ass her design kicks.

… glory be! the bipolar boy's actually got a little follow-through! …

wow, is it that time already? time for the weekly post from matt? oh, how far i've fallen.

thankfully though, it's nice to see that my sister, my best friend, my partner ( over there my favorite girl are all better at this than i am. despite my sister's newly overbearing workload (and the fact that she doesn't have access to the net from her home in the suburbs of Paris) she still manages to post on a regular basis. paul, despite his new computer and subsequent addictions to OmniComics and instant messaging, is still managing to post almost every day. brian, despite numerous hours doing those things that brian does, posts practically every day. and sharon (who's name i can now use, with her blessing, since she's decided to forgo the whole anonymity/hiding behind a persona thing), despite her apparently constant need to change her site's design and where she's hosting it, is also posting on a more frequent basis than yours truly. and she's also baking me brownies. did i mention that i'm still completely in love with this girl?

but it seems like, between busy times at work, fights with webcams, system wipes & reinstalls, and extended hold-out-until-my-eyes-dry-up-from-lack-of-sleep battles with House Ordos and House Harkonnen, i should be able to find some time, somewhere, to update this blog. it seems like it, but it's apparently not true. "we try to resist keptin… he put creatures… into our bodies… makes us do tings." but not "tings" like updating a blog.

i'm not exactly sure why that star trek reference is relevant, but i've not made one in years, and somehow felt it would fit. so sue me.

anyway, so i did finally manage to reinstall windows on my machine at home, get it back up and running, and "glory be!" the webcam seems like it may actually work correctly this time. i hope. of course, i forgot to take it to work with me today, so you don't get to see my practically immobile self sitting in my cube for 8 hours today.

and finally, today is the official last day of the redesign bipolar before we do! contest, so if you're working on an entry, you've got until 12:00 AM tonight to get it in. we've got a couple entries so far, and they're both pretty durn good. i can't wait to show 'em to ya. i think we'll have a few bugs to work out before we get the things up (after judging is done), but barring unforeseen circumstances or acts of god, we should at least have screenshots of all the entries up by the "no later than" winner announcement deadline of 9:00 PM on Monday evening.

12:00 AM tonight, Friday night, the 23rd. remember. and if you've got an idea but haven't even started on it yet, no problem, we're accepting any entry, from the most fully developed online bipolar "portal" site to the most hastily-drawn badly-scanned concept sketch you can come up with. so do it. 12:00 AM. that's midnight. Friday. don't forget. 12:00AM. twelve-o'clock. when the big hand and the little hand are both pointing up (for you analog people) and the sky is dark. that's the deadline.

well, this past week has been a big pile of crap. i still haven't managed to get my sleeping schedule into any kind of reasonable order, and my entire life seems to have been suffering. i can barely stay awake at work, my productivity level has dropped considerably, and i've just generally felt horrible the entire time. why do i always do this to myself… i mean, it's not like i've never treated myself this way before. it's cyclical… i'll do well for a while but always eventually end up running myself into the ground.

to top it all off, brian bought Dune 2000 last weekend in hopes that he & paul & i could play some networked games, and the damn thing has sucked out my will to live. for the last four nights, this game has contributed significantly to my loss of sleep. combined with the fact that the nice new web cam i bought has been fucking up since Tuesday night and i've been spending several hours almost every day since trying to get it working again. hopefully i'll be able to spend some time on it tomorrow so that you can all watch the exciting events a casa de bipolar.

speaking self-referentially of bipolar as i was, i should now point out that we now have our first official entry into the redesign bipolar before we do! contest. i've sworn to both paul and brian that our first contestant (who's apparently in the process of moving her site again) will not get preferential treatment from me. but it looks really nice, so anybody else planning to enter better have their shit together.

well, helped out paul a little more today, and it seems like he's well on his way to becoming a computer geek just like brian & i. he's catching on to some of the more esoteric aspects of owning your own computer, like file/directory organization, and desktop maintenance. he's a quick learner, that one.

while paul was playing around some more, checking out the napster thing and installing some more software, i headed out to compusa again today and took back that piece of crap Kensington web cam. (really, though, the Kensington had much better picture quality, it just wanted to crash my machine). the logitech (same exact type brian has) hasn't crashed my machine once, so i guess i'll take the quality hit. so, bipolar cam3000 is now truly bipolar. there are two separate portables right now, but we're working on a dual portable (most likely with a smaller image size) as well… it's not going to be that hard, we're just lazy.

speaking of being lazy. don't forget about our contest!

as in, "i reckon that'll work…"

of course, if you were really observant yesterday, you'd have noticed that i made the last post around 3:30 AM… so, despite the fact that i was almost falling asleep at the wheel on the drive home from work on Friday, i ended up staying up until almost 4 in the morning.

it's been a pleasant day today. got up around 1 or 1:30, went out for lunch at KFC, then ran over to compusa primarily for kicks, but also so i could buy this year's version of TurboTax deluxe, and so Paul could debate buying a new computer. Well, he didn't, but i did manage to get my software, and picked up a new webcam for 30 bucks, to boot. Though Paul didn't get his computer, he did get approved for a credit card thing, so (looking at it one way) he walked out of the store $2400 dollars richer than when he'd walked in.

we came back to the house and i started trying to set up the web cam. it gave me some weird problems trying to install and update the software, but i finally got it working. then, i tried to change a simple little option in the controls of the software, and it locked up. in fact, it pretty much locked up the computer every time i stopped using the camera. so, when i'd exit the program, it'd lock up the computer. i even tried a different webcam program, and it had the same problem. so, needless to say, i'm taking the damn thing back tomorrow and trying a different cam. (if you're interested, the first and only pic that actually made it onto the site is here

while i was busy fighting with the webcam, paul was apparently busy convincing himself to buy the computer he'd looked at. he and brian went back out to compusa, and about an hour and a half later, the puffin came back with a kick ass new Sony VAIO. his new machine kicks brian's and my machine's combined ass. after setting it up, we debated for an hour or so (as we played around with it) about whether or not we wanted to strip that Windows ME crap off there and put on some Win2k. We finally decided that we couldn't stand the thought of a machine actually running ME on a regular basis, so we ended up reformatting the hard drive. and since then (almost 6 in the evening) brian and paul and i have been diligently working to bring the new beast to full working order. i've had fun, but now, it's time for bed.

oh, and don't forget the contest.

at least i can say this for myself… at least i'm consistently inconsistent.

so, it seems like quite a bit has happened since the last time i posted, but then, nothing's really changed. like brian mentioned, i finally managed to finish watching that dune mini-series that i started watching, what… 3 months ago? watched the second episode on Monday, and the third yesterday (which kind of forced brian into watching it, since he was off work yesterday). overall, i thought the series was really well done. there were some instances of really shitty acting, but the primary characters were all done really well. i thought the second episode was the best of the three, by far. if you've not watched it, be sure to do so if the sci-fi channel reruns it.

i also finally managed to finish cataloguing my comics collection, so that's one huge project pretty-much out of the way. the next step is to find coverscans for all the issues i have, so if anyone knows of any out-of-the-way comics coverscans caches on this 'ol net, .

i cleaned my room, did my laundry, balanced my checkbook, caught up on some overdue email… altogether, it's been a pretty productive week for me. and i'm feeling pretty good about things right now.

and today, apparently, i've been productive and prolific, as not only am i writing this post (finally) i also wrote two rather lengthy posts to a discussion thread on an Amiga site that i frequent (which is something i never do). here's hoping today's trend calms down and spreads out to at least one post here per day… well, it's a thought anyway.

oh, and i know brian's kind of mentioned this, but just in case you hadn't noticed, bipolar has already moved to it's new home. note the swanky new address in the address bar up top…

alright, i've been reading erasing.org for several months now, on a mostly daily basis, and i just now clicked the Sadness link. such a simple concept, replacing words in corporate slogans with the word sadness. simple, profound (in spots), and so much the story of my life (at times).

so, i got an email from since he's been reading, he's not really finding anything out about my life, but about the other useless crap i've felt compelled to fill these pages with for the past few posts.

i figured he would have liked the "holy grail" post, but then he's heard about her enough times, it's old news to him. i figured he would have liked my "year in review" post since i provided a brief roadmap to some of the more important points of my life that have occurred since the inception of this blog.

but he's right. with the exception of the "holy grail" post, everything else has pretty much just been filler.

so, i've been busy at work, at least until a week ago, when the frantic activity suddenly came to a grinding halt due to the fact that no one could seem to get me the remaining three pieces of content that i needed to complete the new corvus site (on which, btw, are welcome).

in my home life, i've been busy cataloging my comics, now that brian and i are helping beta-test OmniComics and catching up on email. i've now got five emails in my inbox at home, compared to the 25 that were sitting in there for a few weeks. i've been trying to refine my focus a little, concentrate on certain projects, see them through to completion… y'know, the way it should be done. like the puffin i tend to get 15 or 20 projects going at the same time, and just never finish them. when i think about all the things i've got "waiting in the wings" i just feel kind of hopeless and lost. so, it's been good to finish the email project, to be near completion on the comics project, (and yes, i'm still working on the bipolar redesign project, which is… uhm… kinda close).

overall, i can't say i'm really happy, but i'm not really depressed either. i'm just kind of… here. and i don't know, maybe that's even worse than the other two.

ah, don't worry 'bout li'l ol' me though, i'll be fine.